Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD)

It was one of the largest and longest lived storms ever recorded in our Solar System.
First seen in late 2010, the above cloud formation in the northern hemisphere of
Saturn started larger than the Earth and
soon spread completely around the planet.

Of course
this little planet is really planet Earth
in a digitally stitched 360 x 180 degree mosaic
captured high in the Chilean Atacama desert.
The seemingly large domes house the 1-meter diameter
telescopes of the
SPECULOOS Southern Observatory.

Famed in festival, story, and song the best known full moon is
the
Harvest Moon.
For northern hemisphere dwellers that's a traditional name of the
closest full moon to the September equinox.
In most North America time zones
this
year's Harvest Moon
will officially rise on Friday, September 13.

These
cosmic dust clouds drift
some 1,300 light-years away along the
fertile starfields of the constellation Cepheus.
The beautiful Iris Nebula,
also known as NGC 7023, blossoms at the upper left.
Not the only nebula in the sky to evoke the imagery of flowers,
its pretty, symmetric form spans about 6 light-years.

What energizes the Heart Nebula?
First, the large emission nebula dubbed
IC 1805 looks, in whole, like a human heart.
The nebula glows brightly in red light
emitted by its most prominent element:
hydrogen.
The red glow and the larger shape are all powered by a
small group of stars near the
nebula's center.

What color is Pluto, really?
It took some effort to figure out.
Even given all of the
images sent back
to Earth when the robotic
New Horizons spacecraft
sped past Pluto in 2015,
processing these
multi-spectral frames to approximate what the
human eye would see was challenging.

How far can you see?
The most distant object easily visible to the unaided eye is M31, the great
Andromeda Galaxy, over two million
light-years away.
Without a telescope, even this immense
spiral galaxy
appears as an unremarkable, faint,
nebulous cloud in the
constellation Andromeda.

Here comes Jupiter!
NASA's robotic spacecraft
Juno
is continuing on its 53-day,
highly-elongated orbits
around our Solar System's largest planet.
The featured video is from perijove 11 in early 2018, the eleventh time
Juno
has passed near Jupiter since it arrived in mid-2016.

The
mysterious blue reflection nebula found in catalogs as VdB 152
or Ced 201 really is very faint.
It lies at the tip of the long
dark nebula Barnard 175 in a
dusty complex that has also been called
Wolf's Cave.

Massive stars in our Milky Way Galaxy live spectacular lives.
Collapsing from vast cosmic clouds, their nuclear furnaces
ignite and create heavy elements in their cores.
After a few million years, the
enriched material is blasted
back into interstellar space where star formation can begin anew.